Whose Information Society?

"We argue that the new communications and information technologies threaten to exacerbate, rather than alleviate, regional disparities." "Our own argument is that when (new) technology and technological innovation are demystified and reinstated within their real social contexts, then the prognosis for the information society is far more problematic." "Within this naive and simplistic association there is a lack of awareness of inequalities and disparities within 'the world's freest societies'. The realities of information access are far more complex than Maisonrouge allows for: inequalities with respect to information resources exist along class, gender, ethnic, regional and national lines."

"This argument that 'gaps' or inequalities are only temporary anomalies during the early stages of exploitation of any given technology draws upon the theory of technological evolution or modernization which, we argue, characterizes the work of technological futurists such as Wilson Dizard or Alvin Toffler. It draws on the same repertoire of progress, growth, productivity. Within this conception, technological growth is a generally benevolent force, creating wealth, freedom, democracies. Inequalities remain subsidiary problems that can be resolved through yet further growth, and through political initiatives to ensure the most just distribution of the ever-greater pie. As such, this perspective stands in a long tradition of liveral Utopain thought which has equated democracy, freedom, equality and self-development with the promise of technology. What is fundamental, in fact, to liberal democratic societies, as Albert Borgmann (1984) has argued, is that technological growth consistently has been the panacea for the endemic social and economic inequalities of capitalist society. Technology offers itself as the force that will create even more wealth for social distribution. And so it is now with information technology, as with a whole stream of earlier technologies. (....) Yet social inequalities persist (...). Our own belief is that information technologies should be seen as manifestations of the prevailing social relations (Robins and Webster 1980) (...). It builds upon, rather than supersedes or dissolves, existing class and regional inequalities - it cannot evaporate the social and economic history out of which it emerges (...). We believe that the new technologies will tend to extend and deepen social and regional inequalities rather than anneal them. The evidence we have gathered suggests that the 'information revolution' is manufacturing itself, not as an unproblematic social evolution, but as a process of uneven and unequal social upheaval." "This is a real problem and a real issue for social policy." "The interrelated issues of class and region which we discuss in this article must be seen in terms of wider and fundamental political issues relating to democracy, economic opportunity, and the quality of social and cultural life. These are the issues we raise when we ask: Whose information society?".

"The questions that must be addressed in the context of new communications and information technologies are difficult and divisive. But they are not new questions: they refer to old and familiar problems of social, economic, regional (and also gender, ethnic and age) inequalities. They will not be solved by ritual invocations of technological progress and inevitability."

from Mark Hepworth and Kevin Robins (1988!): Whose Information Society? A View from the periphery. in Media Culture and Society, 10:323-343